News & Updates

The Latest on Internet Pharmacies, Supplements, Designer Drugs, and Other High-Risk Merchants

A couple of weeks ago, The Oregonian profiled LegitScript in an article entitled, “Portland firm watchdogs online pharmacies for investigators and firms like Google.”

The article began by profiling Patricia Parks, a patient on Social Security who watches every dollar. Ms. Parks isn’t the first we’ve heard about who has ordered from globalpharmacycanada.com, a rogue Internet pharmacy that implies it is “Canadian” in some way but — as the operator of the website admitted to Oregonian reporter Nick Budnick — is not really shipping drugs from Canada. LegitScript designated this website as “rogue” because it continues to operate despite being the subject of a Health Canada safety warning. (Health Canada is the regulatory equivalent of the FDA for Canada.)

In fact, the operators of the globalpharmacycanada.com website have set it up so that if you’re physically located in Canada, you can’t even get to the website — nothing appears but a blank page. This is not uncommon: Richard Petko, who operates the website, is physically in Canada, but he’s neither a pharmacist nor a physician — he’s just a guy running a website, without even having a pharmacy license in Canada or the US (with the US being the target market). Nevertheless, by not selling to Canadians, he can avoid being arrested by Canadian law enforcement. When it comes to other countries’ regulators, however, Petko operates as if he has free reign — despite not even having valid pharmacy licenses where he sells prescription drugs.

LegitScript noted in the article that globalpharmacycanada.com also has ties to Belize, the Czech Republic, and potentially Azerbaijan.

The article goes on to talk a bit more about LegitScript, our clients, our business model, and history. We encourage folks interested in finding out more about LegitScript and what we do to check out the article.